


pale stars shine upon a bed of dark red flowers

by simple emotions (roseboba)



Category: The Wayhaven Chronicles (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: F/M, but i know it's spring, i didn't think about what time of day this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 21:20:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29972445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseboba/pseuds/simple%20emotions
Summary: on the nature of love as a cure.
Relationships: Female Detective/Nathaniel "Nate" Sewell
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	pale stars shine upon a bed of dark red flowers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brightpinkpeppercorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightpinkpeppercorn/gifts).



> maybe this is going to be a little sad, and on your birthday i do not want you to be sad (i never want you to be sad, but especially not on your birthday), but when i think of you i think of the sweetness and purity of the way you love and treat those you love, and so maybe this is sad but it’s also a tribute to you and how everything you touch (but especially me) turns blushing pink (peppercorns) and golden. okay? okay. 
> 
> happy birthday 💕

‘But surely I’m not born to hate. I’m born to love.’ 

(Antigone, line 523) 

🌙

The press of his lips — soft and sweet-tasting as she knows they are — to her throat is a dream, slow-moving and unreal; she digs her nails into his back and feels it solid beneath her and knows it is not. Her mouth falls open, her fingers tangled in his dark hair as he brushes kisses on the side of her neck, and the curve where it meets her shoulders, and the space between her collarbones, before he finds her throat again.

Surina makes soft sounds, hymnal hums, slurred encouragements as he lavishes her with kisses. The feeling of them lingers on her bare skin, but he does not, forehead colliding with her shoulder as she listens to him breathe slowly, in a way that is counted, measured. 

“I can’t —” 

It is rare she hears him wordless, and she pulls back, cupping Nate’s handsome face in her hands, quietly awed by both she is the one who is allowed to do it and his proximity. Up close, he looks inhuman — not for the reasons he thinks he is, but because such beauty feels as though it could only be supernatural. Her thumbs stroke long lines along his cheekbones, the stubble that dots his chin bristling beneath her palms. 

“Then don’t.”

“Suri darling,” he murmurs, catching her hands and kissing her fingers, one by one, “I’m sorry.” His lips slide up one hand, trailing up the back of it to her wrist, her forearm. It is not the first time he has used mindless affection to escape the complexity of his feelings for her, she knows. 

In the humidity, his hair has taken on a slight curl, and when he releases her hands, she toys with one of the waves at the nape of his neck as he lays across her lap. “You have nothing to apologise for, my sweet love.”

“I thought that maybe — I thought that finding you — someone who loved me — would fix me,” he says quietly, sounding entirely unlike himself. His tone is strangled, as though he knows how ridiculous the implication that he needs ‘fixing’ is, but he thinks it anyway. There are things she feels that way about. She understands. Surina stills with her hand still splayed across the back of his hand, buried in the loose tendrils that feel like fine silk between her fingers.

“Fix you?” she asks, when he doesn’t revoke it.

She hopes to never see that expression on his face ever again. 

“I know that — love is not some magic antidote to suffering,” Nate says, with a caution both characteristic of his ordinary speech and yet still unfamiliar to her, “I know that being loved is not going to heal me. That expecting it to is — madness. I know these things. I promise you, darling, I know these things. And yet — I cannot help but feel as if I have failed you. For not being cured by your love. I am still a — I am still the same person I was when you met me. I see you grow and change every day that I am with you, and yet I remain the same. And I’m just so — terribly sorry.” 

Her eyes must shine when she looks down at him, because she feels tears welling at her lashes. “Nathaniel Sewell.”

“Surina Batra,” he begs.

For a moment, the only thing she hears are human sounds — the beat of her heart, her soft breathing, the rustle of her sheets as she shifts. Ordinarily, these things comfort her, but now they are a reminder of the distance that remains between them. The fact that her love cannot cure his vampirism, cannot deliver him from the cruelty of his fate or his feelings about it — but she never expected it to. She never expected to meet him at all. 

Surina lifts her chin, haughty, looking down at him with a cold kind of fury, the kind that she reserves, deep emotion. 

“And here I thought that four hundred years would be enough time to make at least one man less of a fool,” she says, “Though perhaps I should have known when nine hundred of them did nothing for Commanding Agent du Mortain.”

He closes his mouth, swallowing. 

“Nate, please listen to me. I understand that I can never understand what it is like. I know that it is your greatest pain. I would never try to take that away from you. But your pain is what tethers you to your humanity, my sweet love. I need you to know that you have to be angry, and you have to be afraid, and you have to be upset, to be human. Right now, you are as human as anyone I know. I have never wanted you to be anything but yourself. I don’t want to cure you. I just wish that — all I want is to make your burden lighter. And I want you to lighten mine. I love you, and I love all your wounds, knowing that you love me with all of mine.”

She leans down, cradling his chin between her hands again, hair falling down to curtain them as she leaves a kiss on the end of his nose. 

“I don’t expect my words to change anything for you right now, Nate. But we’ll work on it. Together.”

She is acutely aware of the treachery of the word forever, both in that it is not promised to her and that it is promised to him, but it comes to her mind unbidden — laying with him, it feels as though they have all the time in the world, and if he does not believe now that he has been changed by love, by loving her, by being loved by her, she has centuries left to convince him. 

Nate reaches up to stroke her cheek, something sparkling in his gaze, and his fingers trail down her face to her jaw, and her throat, again, thumb sliding around the outside of it, a necklace of his touch.

“Together,” he repeats, “I love you.”

And for now, for both of them, that is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> somehow forgot to make the MARch pun (?). happy MARch 💕


End file.
